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Pilger is the closest we have to the greatest correspondents of the 1930s... The truth in his hands is a weapon, to be picked up and brandished and used in the struggle against evil and injustice Guardian Pilger's strength is his gift for finding the image, the instant, that reveals all - he is a photographer using words instead of a camera Salmon Rushdie A modern interpretation of world affairs in a cynical age Independent

Award-winning British journalist Pilger, author of A Secret Country: The Hidden Australia (1992), looks again for the truth behind Orwellian officialdom in Great Britain, the US, South Africa, Indonesia, and, most notably, Burma. Pilger makes a clear and disturbing case that US management of the media in the Gulf War covered up one-quarter of a million deaths, most of them civilian. And the reader may well follow his claims, US protests to the contrary, that the subsequent embargo kept food out of the mouths of children and medicine from the sick. But to go light on his criticism of Saddam Hussein or to claim that Israel is nothing but a US client state that has committed more acts of terrorism that any other Middle East entity seems like old Soviet propaganda, rather than truth. Pilger is, in fact, fervently anticapitalist in the manner of an old-style Soviet apparatchik. Thus, one cannot entirely trust his critique of big media such as CNN and the various enterprises of Rupert Murdoch, though such criticism is gratifying and long overdue. Pilger strikes home the most convincingly when he takes on British arms merchants, and he does so by sticking to numbers and actual quotations from officials. He's at his most passionate in his two chapters on modern Burma, writing about a railroad and an oil pipeline being built with slave labor, even with child labor. One would hardly expect Pilger to say kind things about Burma's generals, and he documents the collusion of multinational companies in the exploitation of Burma, but even here one senses that a fine reporter has veered into pamphleteering. A brave and badly needed corrective that itself seems untrustworthy at times but manages to point out the lies behind slick official policy and criticize the media that sell them, even so. (Kirkus Reviews)

In this powerful book, journalist and film maker John Pilger strips away the layers of deception, dissembling language and omission that prevent us from understanding how the world really works. From the invisible corners of Tony Blair's Britain to Burma, Vietnam, Australia, South Africa and the illusions of the 'media age', power, he argues, has its own agenda. Unchallenged, it operates to protect its interests with a cynical disregard for people - shaping, and often devastating, millions of lives. By unravelling the hidden histories of contemporary events, Pilger allows us to read between the lines. He also celebrates the eloquent defiance and courage of those who resist oppression and give us hope for the future. Tenaciously researched and written with passion and wit, Hidden Agendas will change the way you see the world.

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John Pilger grew up in Sydney, Australia. He was a war correspondent, author and film-maker. He twice won British journalism's highest award, that of Journalist of the Year, for his work all over the world, notably in Cambodia and Vietnam. He was also voted International Reporter of the Year and winner of the United Nations Associated Peace Prize and Gold Medal. For his broadcasting, he won France's Reporter Sans Fronti res, an American television Academy Award, an Emmy, and the Richard Dimbleby Award, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. In 2003, he received the Sophie Prize for 'thirty years of exposing deception and improving human rights'. He died in December 2023.

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